The Dish

My friend Chris Matthews, among others, thinks Jesse Jackson should be given a pass for his little daughter because he has been honest about it and taken responsibility. I’m not sure Chris is aware of the following press release issued on March 19, 1999, pointed out to me by the New York Post columnist, Rod Dreher. The release has been buried on the Operation-PUSH site and is extremely hard to find. But here’s the relevant passage: “Dr. Karin L. Stanford, director, Washington Bureau/vice president, programs Citizenship Education Fund (CEF), heads the public policy division of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and CEF. A former assistant professor of political science and African American studies at the University of Georgia, Stanford has received numerous accolades. Her greatest reward yet, remarks the director, will be the birth of her first child with Atty. James Simmons in May. Stanford, who is also a breast cancer survivor, takes maternity and family leave April 1.” So PUSH didn’t only deny Jackson’s paternity – but fingered someone else! To be fair, maybe Jackson wasn’t sure. But that doesn’t justify asserting it was someone else’s daughter. Again: I have no desire to judge Jackson for his affair. We’re all human. But honesty is important – especially in a public figure lecturing others about family values and counseling a president for hiding a sexual liaison.

The Democratic Leadership Council is back. Has anyone noticed their post-election resurgence? First there was the p.r. coup in organizing a crammed National Press Club meeting on the theme, “Why Gore Lost.” This was useful for a couple of obvious reasons. The first is that some Democrats still can’t get it into their heads that Gore did actually lose. The issue here is not over-votes in some Florida county no-one had ever heard of before last November. It is that Gore blew what should have been a landslide by a suicidal embrace of populist claptrap devised by Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum. I’m surprised the DLC isn’t more enraged at Gore. Didn’t he owe a great deal of his ascendancy to DLC credibility as a centrist alternative to paleo-liberalism? At least Clinton, for the most part, didn’t betray the party on policy grounds. The latest encouraging fusillade to prove that the center isn’t dead is the emergence of Evan Bayh as the new DLC head. His tax policy position is the only Democratic posture that can survive the Gore juggernaut. In his first speech as DLC chair, Bayh said, “I embrace the president’s call for a tax cut that will benefit every American because I believe in freedom.” Freedom, huh? When was the last time you heard a Democrat support that idea with conviction? Then he added a fiscally conservative note: “Many of us do not want to go back to the days of deficits. We don’t want to go back to the days of increasing the national debt upon the back of our children.” This is exactly the posture the Democrats need to take in countering Bush’s so-far-brilliant p.r. offensive in defense of tax cuts. My only worry is that there is no-one out there in the media to defend Bayh.

In London, all anyone is talking about is the fate of Peter Mandelson, gay centrist ally of Tony Blair. Mandelson, former Northern Ireland secretary, was a key player in reorienting the old Labour Party to embrace conservative economics, while still sticking to support for the creaking British welfare state. He was just forced to resign over a small piece of corruption – the kind of thing Bill Clinton would do before breakfast each morning. He allegedly made a call to help a wealthy Indian businessman get a UK passport after the said businessman coughed up some cash for the hideous Millennium Dome. After denying, then admitting, then denying the charge, last week, Mandelson endeared himself even more to the Labour leadership by campaigning for his innocence in a series of visits to Tory newspaper offices – just while Blair was unveiling an agenda for a second Labour term. Today’s papers reveal the Labour boot going right into his privates, as they say over here. “I hope he goes away and has a wonderful time with Reinaldo,” one senior Labour party official told the press. Reinaldo is Mandelson’s Brazilian lover. It wasn’t exactly an “outing” since Mandelson is one of those weird characters who is known to be gay, won’t deny it, but won’t say it either. But it was a classic piece of homophobic vitriol that the Left still knows how to deliver when it needs to. The Right is worse, of course. The Tory press here still routinely refers to buggers, poofters, benders, and so on. But it seems clear to me that those gay men and women in public life who don’t simply come out and say it, and then move on, are always going to be vulnerable to this kind of attack. The answer – for pols on right and left – is unashamed candor and then a matter-of-fact transition to other issues as a public person. It’s the strongest defense. Honesty, in my experience, almost always is.

We’re working on it. I’m sorry but I can’t reply to everyone who has emailed me in support of the idea. There have been hundreds of emails. But we hope to have something up and running in the very near future. Once again: I’m really, really grateful for your support. It seems almost certain, if you put your buck where your emails are, that this site will be going for as long as we all want it to.

So I spend two hours answering emails on the plane and there’s another 150 when I get to Jolly Old! It’s wonderful to get these; and even more wonderful to find how many of you are prepared to help keep this show on the road. But I have now got the message. There isn’t enough tea to keep me awake long enough to answer them all promptly so please be patient. Below you’ll find a weird function of our limited funds. My trusty volunteer techie and designer, Vince Allen, has taken a week off, so I can’t post real pieces till Monday, when he returns. I can only do the Dish. So I’ve added my Jackson TRB to the Dish today, rather than wait four days to get it online here. Normality will return when Vince does. Now I’m going to bed. It’s morning here and after my ritual kippers and fried bread, I’m hitting the sack.

A Texan correspondent points out that, given her educational background, Molly Ivins’ hick routine is more than a little phony. He also retells a story he heard from someone in the state capitol in Austin: “Then-Governor Bush was hosting a party. Ivins, as an all too prominent journalist, was in attendance and probably a bit too inebriated. She made a point of talking loudly and obscenely in the governor’s presence, playing the gauche rustic. Without losing a beat, Bush turned to her and said, “You sure have come a long way from Smith [college], Molly.” Apparently, that shut her up. It takes a village idiot.

Catching a plane today to London. The flight will give me a chance to catch up on my correspondence – I’m 200 emails behind. I’ll be posting regularly from over there, so they might have an Anglo tinge. I’m doing a New York Times Magazine story on the newish Conservative Party leader in Britain, William Hague, who happens to be an old college friend of mine. He’ll be up against Blair in May, in all likelihood. I’ll be five hours ahead so don’t worry if I seem to be posting pieces in the middle of the night. Not that I don’t do that already. But this time, I’ll have an excuse.

So Denise Rich takes the fifth on the connections between her husband’s pardon and her own fundraising for Clinton. I know we’re not supposed to legally infer guilt from such a statement, but I’m perfectly entitled to infer guilt morally. The same Fox News story says she has given an “enormous sum of money” to the Clinton library. Enormous by Rich’s standards? She must have bankrolled half of it! It’s all beginning to make more sense now.

The mail is running overwhelmingly in favor of an honors system to keep this show on the road. We’ll set something up soon. Better than pop-up ads or other paraphernalia. I’m also very heartened by your support. Watch this space.

Great point by Virginia Postrel, one of the smartest libertarians out there. She points out on her website, vpostrel.com, that Ronald Reagan was highly educated for his class and age: “For a working class kid born in 1911 – especially for the son of a drunken ne’er-do-well – he was unusually well educated. Attention elite journalists: Ronald Reagan wasn’t a baby boomer. He did not even go to school on the G.I. Bill. Reagan graduated from college during the Depression – something precious few people of his generation, and hardly any of his social background did. According to a 1962 Census study, only 6.7 percent of American men born between 1908 and 1917 whose fathers were in “manual and service” jobs had four-year college degrees; only 9.6 percent of all U.S. men that age did. So Reagan was not only intelligent. He had more schooling than 90 percent of other American men his age.” That would make him, well, smarter than Molly Ivins.